14 DAY TRIAL // Sony is convinced that its tough stance on hackers and pirates is in the best interest of its player base and one leading executive from the company has expressed bewilderment at the hostility coming from some players who use the Sony gaming devices.
Speaking to CVG Andrew House, who is the leader of the European division of Sony Computer Entertainment, said, “There were some very ugly threats going on, and we became the target. The irony, for me, is that we became the target because we thought, I think quite fairly, that we were trying to protect our intellectual property rights from piracy. But it was ironically that which led a certain sector of opinion to think that, somehow, we were acting against their best interests.”
The executive believes that the events of April 2011 have shown the company that hacking attacks are an ongoing concern and that all branches of the company need to consider the problem and come up with practical solutions to it.
House added, “We’ve hired an extremely experienced Chief Information Security Officer at the corporate level, not just on the PlayStation level. We’ve revamped our systems to the best of our ability, to try to ensure that this kind of thing, as far as possible, can be prevented.”
The PlayStation Network has been attacked in the middle of April of last year and the hackers managed to gain access to the personal information, including credit card data, for a huge number of gamers.
The service was down for more than one month but since then Sony has stated that it has managed to gain rather than loose players and that the network is now more solid than ever.
Initially Sony pointed the finger at the hacktivist group Anonymous but has failed to deliver clear proof that they were behind the attacks.